Month: October 2021

As a space pirate once said, we’re not out of this yet (New York Times):

MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.

Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.

Republicans will be back, leaving Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania facing “a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.”

Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti write:

Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”

Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.

“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Evers, once Wisconsin’s superintendent of schools.

Now Evers worries that if his reelection campaign fails next year, Wisconsin Republican legislators would have a clear path to overturning the state’s 2024 presidential election results. “Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors,” Epstein and Corasaniti write. What would happen if a Republican governor refused?

“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”

See, Republicans are all about restoring faith in election systems they have worked decades to undermine with relentless, unsubtantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Tear down the building and you can rebuild from the ground up. Your way.

In Pennsylvania and Michigan as well, Republican candidates for governor are running on “election integrity,” essentially, on erecting new barriers to voting or else prohibiting making voting easier.

Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.

“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”

Democracy-optional Republicans have dropped all pretense of allowing voters to decide who represents them.

It’s not as if Republicans have not telegraphed the move. Under Michigan’s Public Act 436, then-Gov. Rick Snyder appointed emergency managers empowered to take control of city governments and school boards, particularly minority-majority cities, elected by voters. Chris Savage (Eclectablog) noted in 2013 that half of Michigan’s black residents were living “in cities where their elected officials have been replaced by a single, state-appointed ruler.”

Chris Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 2013:

“It totally decimates democracy,” Detroit resident Catherine Phillips says of state takeover. “We have the right by federal law to allow us to go and choose by way of voting who we want to represent us in municipalities and school districts. By implementation of this dictator law, they have taken that right away.”

A study published Sept. 14 in the journal State and Local Government Review finds that the law affected more than drinking water in Michigan:

“Our findings provide evidence that decisions about state takeovers in Michigan are not entirely, or perhaps primarily, driven by objective measures of financial distress. Cities with larger Black populations and a higher reliance on state funding are more likely to be taken over,” said study lead author Sara Hughes, an environmental policy analyst and assistant professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.

“We also find that cities that have had takeovers are more likely to see changes to their drinking water systems, such as rate increases and privatization. Whether these patterns are the product of racial bias, flawed policy and implementation, or broader political motivations is a question that could be taken up in future research.”

The most notorious recent example of water-system changes during a Michigan municipal takeover occurred in Flint, which was under emergency management when critical decisions about the city’s water supply and water treatment protocols were made, and where emergency managers were resistant to public concerns about the safety of the city’s drinking water. For nearly 18 months, from April 2014 to October 2015, the city of Flint delivered inadequately treated Flint River water to residents, exposing thousands to elevated lead levels and other contaminants.

The 10 other Michigan cities that came under emergency management between 1990 and 2017, and which were analyzed in the study, are Highland Park, Hamtramck, Three Oaks Village, Pontiac, Ecorse, Benton Harbor, Allen Park, Detroit, River Rouge and Lincoln Park.

See link to Savage’s post above about the demography of those towns.

Hughes and her co-authors expected that at least one of the financial indicators used by the state, or a composite financial health score based on all the indicators, would be able to identify all 11 Michigan cities that have experienced takeover.

Surprisingly, that was not the case. The composite financial stress score captured just 45% of those cities. But a city’s level of reliance on state revenue sharing captured 82% of the takeovers, while the percentage of Black residents and median household income correctly predicted 64% and 55% of the takeovers, respectively.

“These findings support previous work challenging the technocratic and rational basis of state municipal takeover laws and pointing to the inherent politics in municipal takeovers, specifically the bias and structural challenges facing Black and poor communities,” the authors wrote.

You have been warned. This erosion predates Donald Trump. Under Republican rule democracy is now optional.

From former Trump shadow press secretary Stephanie Grisham comes “news” that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump “thought they were a shadow president and first lady.” She thinks Ivanka is the “brains” of their little operation.

And Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff? On “a scale of awfulness in the Trump White House, with a five being the most terrible person around,” Meadows rates a 12. (He was my congressman; I could have told you that.)

Already these tales from inside the Trump White House confirming what we already knew about its tawdry, grifting sliminess have, as Dieter might say, grown tiresome.

But even as Grisham profits from admitting she can never redeem herself for enabling the Trump administration, there is that teensy bit of self-awareness to her credit. She never expected to be a traitor like those who wrote Trump tell-alls before her. She helped the White House draft responses to books by those people. With publication of “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” she is one of those people.

“I don’t think I can rebrand,” Grisham told New York Magazine‘s Olivia Nuzzi. “I think this will follow me forever.”

“I believe that I was part of something unusually evil,” said Grisham, “and I hope that it was a one-time lesson for our country and that I can be a part of making sure that at least that evil doesn’t come back now.”

One can not only hope but work to make sure it doesn’t. We’ve spent much time over the last six years dancing around attaching the F-word to Trumpism. It was arresting to see a former Trump insider attach the E-word.

Speaking of arresting….

One year ago today Trump returned to the White House after being in the hospital 3 days with Covid 👇

Here's a better look at Trump immediately taking off his mask when he reached the White House. It looks like he motioned for photographers to come up near him and take photos. 😳 pic.twitter.com/plrGtkJZP6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2020

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on October 5, 2021.

As he gasped for breath he defiantly yanked off his mask. It said everything. His people were watching.

It’s very unpopular. But I do have to wonder about the minority that thinks this is ok. They represent tens of millions of out fellow Americans.

A clear majority of Americans, including most Republicans, opposes key provisions of the controversial new Texas abortion law, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.

The law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, which is before many women know they’re pregnant. It also allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion.

The survey found that almost 6 in 10 Americans oppose a ban on abortions after cardiac activity is detected, at about six to eight weeks into a typical pregnancy.

That includes 59% of Republicans, 61% of Democrats and 53% of independents.

I mean, it’s great that more that 60% of the country opposes this 6 week “heartbeat” bill and that more than 70% reject vigilantism. But damn — that’s still a lot of people who back this wildly extremist legislation. And we have good reason to believe that among them are members of the US Supreme Court.

You think Rudy Giuliani has changed? Not really:

At around 11 a.m. on September 16, 1992, Norm Steisel heard a roar from outside his office in City Hall. Peering out the window, he saw thousands of off-duty police officers filling the narrow park that surrounds the building, a grand neoclassical structure that, all of a sudden, had started to feel like the tightest of traps.

Steisel, then first deputy mayor of operations, heard officers chanting, “Dinkins gotta go!” and “The mayor’s on crack.” They carried signs bearing racist cartoon images of Mayor David Dinkins with humongous lips and nose and an Afro, including several calling the city’s first Black mayor a “washroom attendant.”

The officers had a permit to protest, which confined the demonstration to Murray Street, a road perpendicular to City Hall lined with Irish pubs. They were mad that Dinkins was pushing a bill that would change the composition of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), the oversight body that examined complaints of police misconduct, from half-cop–half-civilian to all civilian and making it independent of the New York Police Department. The bill was part of a wave of measures proposed by cities across the country in the wake of the shocking, caught-on-tape beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in March 1991 and, just months earlier, the April 1992 acquittal of all four officers in the case.

Dinkins was uptown attending a funeral, which meant that Steisel was the highest-ranking person in the administration inside City Hall. Days later, Steisel talked to Phil Caruso, president of the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (which later changed its name to the Police Benevolent Association, or PBA). Caruso, a powerful figure who was respected by the rank and file, tried to explain the officers’ anger.

“‘You don’t treat these guys with respect,’” Steisel recalled Caruso telling him. “‘When you create a Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is going to challenge everything they do, it’s just going to respond to “Black whining.”’”

Steisel remembered Caruso telling him, “‘If you don’t respect them, you’ll never have a safe city again.’”

This sentiment was echoed in the summer of 2020 when everyone was so nervous about upsetting the police in the wake of the George Floyd murders and blithely asserted that they would leave people to die in the streets if they didn’t get their way. This is one of the underpinnings of authoritarianism and the right has been deploying it for many, many years.

Lo and behold, good old Rudy, “America’s Mayor” was right in the middle of it:

The day of the protest, Rudy Giuliani was also outside the building with a microphone. Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney and failed mayoral candidate in 1989, declared, “The reason the morale of the police department of the City of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins!” The crowd roared.

“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the police department is so low,” Giuliani said. “He blames it on me. He blames it on you. Bullshit!” Giuliani then attacked an anti-corruption commission impaneled by Dinkins, which he said was created “to protect David Dinkins’s political ass.” More cheers rose from the crowd.

The demonstration began to spiral out of control, amplified by officers drinking at the pubs on Murray Street. Thousands more had shown up than were expected. Deputy Mayor Fritz Alexander called the police on the police. Acting Police Commissioner Ray Kelly dispatched a phalanx of officers to City Hall for crowd control.

That was when Steisel started to get scared.

“I was getting concerned they’re gonna storm the building,” Steisel said. “I mean, these fucking guys are crazy.”

This was the beginning of an outburst of violence that, for various reasons, has been all but scrubbed from New York’s historical memory. It not only involved Mayor Dinkins but was a formative experience for two future mayors and the city’s likely next mayor — who back then was a 32-year-old transit-police officer. “It’s almost equivalent to what we saw at the Capitol,” Eric Adams told me recently, referring to the Trump-inspired insurrection on January 6.

A closer look back at the City Hall Riot, as it deserves to be known, also serves as a reminder of the challenges Adams himself will face when he takes office next year: a police department that, all these decades later, still often seems hell-bent on resisting meaningful reform.

You can read the rest of the story at NY Magazine and it’s a doozy.

It’s also about corruption. Just today, this happened:

Federal investigators on Tuesday morning raided the Manhattan office of one of New York City’s main police unions in connection with an ongoing investigation, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, represents about 13,000 active and retired police sergeants in New York. Its headquarters were searched as part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, the people said.

Investigators also executed a search warrant at the Long Island home of the union’s president, Edward D. Mullins, a person with knowledge of the operation said.

Although the precise focus and scope of the investigation could not immediately be determined, the search of Mr. Mullins’s home suggests that the inquiry is at least in some measure focused on him.

Nothing creeped me out more than seeing so many cops worshipping Trump. But then, this police riot and the politics it represents was the world in which he lived. They were very sympatico from the start.

It’s a dangerous culture and not just in NYC. Police reform is essential.

Big Pharma has incentives, alright. Incentives to make massive profits at the expense of taxpayers and all Americans, Mitch’s BS notwithstanding:

This argument was busted by Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) in a hearing about drug company price gouging.

She proved that drug companies plow most of their revenues into dividends, and could easily afford to reduce prices w/out impacting research investment.https://t.co/jy78gK9OwG

— Monty Boa (@MontyBoa99) October 5, 2021

And how about this?

U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. on Friday, Oct. 1, said it would seek authorization for the first oral antiviral pill to treat COVID-19, after a clinical trial showed it cut the risk of hospitalization or death in half when given to high-risk people during infection.

The drug, known as molnupiravir, was first shown to be efficacious against coronaviruses including the COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, by investigators in the lab of Mark Denison, MD, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and their colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Initially developed by the Emory Institute for Drug Development (EIDD) in Atlanta, the drug — then called EIDD-1931 (oral form, EIDD-2801) — was subsequently licensed to Merck and Miami-based Ridgeback Therapeutics, which announced the results of the phase 3 clinical trial today.

In addition, the VUMC researchers contributed to development of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, which was granted emergency use authorization by the FDA in December 2020. They analyzed the ability of the vaccine to stimulate robust immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 in a phase 1 clinical trial.

Much of the coronavirus research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Taxpayers are footing much of the research and development of drugs. Big Pharma reaps the profits. That is an outrage. The Grim Reaper knows he’s lying but that’s just how he rolls.

As QAnon and other conspiracy theories claim that Hillary Clinton and her blood-drinking minions are running child trafficking rings out of pizza parlors, this has actually been happening all over the world and the same people shrug.

Clergy members in the Roman Catholic Church in France sexually abused more than 200,000 minors over the past seven decades, according to an estimate published on Tuesday by an independent commission that concluded the problem was far more pervasive and systematic than previously known.

The long-awaited 2,500-page report by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church laid out in detail how the church hierarchy had repeatedly silenced the victims and failed to report or discipline the clergy members involved.

“The church failed to see or hear, failed to pick up on the weak signals, failed to take the rigorous measures that were necessary,” Jean-Marc Sauvé, the commission president, said at a news conference in Paris on Tuesday. For years, the church showed a “deep, total and even cruel indifference toward victims,” he added.

The right wing fringers do more than shrug. They put people on the Supreme Court who are dedicated to making religion (well, Christian) such a fetish that they are basically allowed to flout all laws and civilized norms in the name of freedom.

And it isn’t confined to the Catholic church. These institutions abuse their power just as they all do. And they are always defended by the same people — the ones who preach morality the most vociferously.

Update — as I was saying:

 The old music box factory had been abandoned for years on the outskirts of the Swiss mountain town, with paint curling at the edges of its dingy grey and yellow walls.

It was the perfect hiding place for the young French mother and her 8-year-old daughter at the heart of Operation Lima, an international child abduction plot planned and funded by a French group with echoes of the far-right extremist movement QAnon.

Lola Montemaggi had lost custody of her daughter, Mia, to her own mother months earlier because French government child protective services feared the young woman was unstable. Montemaggi found people online who shared the QAnon belief that government workers themselves were running a child trafficking ring. Then she turned to her network to do what she needed to do: Extract Mia.

If there has ever been a more pathetic, sycophantic, groveling weasel in all of world history, I don’t know who it might be:

Former vice president Mike Pence said media reporting on the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection is meant to “demean” supporters of former president Donald Trump, some of whom stormed the Capitol that day shouting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News on Monday night, Pence sought to explain media coverage of the Jan. 6 riot in which he was hurriedly evacuated from the Senate chamber and taken to a secure location amid threats to his life.

“I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January,” Pence told Hannity. “They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020.”

Some 800 members of a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol as they sought to stop the counting of electoral votes for Joe Biden in the worst attack on the seat of democracy since the War of 1812. The riot left five people dead and more than 140 members of law enforcement injured.

He seems to think the MAGA faithful are going to forgive him for failing Dear Leader and bring him back into the fold. He is wrong. But Trump and his minions will no doubt enjoy watching him demean himself over and over again trying.

His political career is over, it’s just a matter of how history remembers him. He’s chosen to be remembered as the most masochistic, obsequious Trump toadie of them all.

The right to be let alone, wrote Justice Louis D. Brandeis in his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, is “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Perhaps up there with the right to privacy in our ostensibly democratic republic (ODR) is the right to vote.

To secure that right now under attack from multiple quarters in our ODR, Democrats in the U.S. Senate hope to pass a trimmed-back version of the Freedom to Vote Act. The act, says the Center for American Progress, would “set nationwide voting standards to help counteract anti-democratic laws passed by legislatures in at least 17 states” driven by “partisan, conspiracy-minded election officials [that] could sabotage legitimate election results.” CAP offers background I don’t need to repeat here, but here is the gist of what it would do:

The Freedom to Vote Act has four principal pillars:

1. 1. It would set national standards to protect and expand the right to vote.
   2. It would help protect the integrity of elections and make it harder for partisan officials to subvert valid election results.
   3. It would prohibit partisan gerrymandering and empower courts to invalidate overly partisan maps, an urgently needed change given that many states have already begun their 10-year redistricting process.
   4. It would reduce the power of big money in elections by, for example, shining a bright light on so-called dark money campaign spending and implementing a cutting-edge voluntary small-donor public financing system for House elections.

It turns out that those things are pretty popular in this ODR. So says recent polling by Navigator Research:

The polling indicates that while solid majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe their votes make a difference in elections, roughly a third of Republicans and independents disagree.

Three in Four Agree Their Vote Can Make a Difference and Have an Impact in Elections

Democrats are significantly more likely to feel that their vote can make a difference and have an impact in elections than independents or Republicans.

While Two in Three Are Confident In Past and Future Ballots Being Counted, Most Republicans Disagree

Among independents, three in five say they are confident their past ballots were counted correctly and believe the same of future ballots; only two in five Republicans say the same of each.

That carefully GOP-cultivated lack of faith in elections is perhaps why Republicans seem less invested in free and fair elections in the first place. Because why take chances on losing?

Half of Americans Have Heard of the Freedom to Vote Act and a Majority Support It

More than half of Americans support the Freedom to Vote Act, though a third initially say they are “not sure” without description of the legislation.

Most Americans Support the Freedom to Vote Act With or Without Partisan Cues

The difference, however, is driven mostly by Republicans (25% support with Biden, 41% without).

Michael Feinstein and Howie Hawkins complain at Truthout that, as written, the Freedom to Vote Act would terminate the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, matching moneys third parties such as the Greens rely on for getting their voices heard. The pair want the bill passed with the public finance preserved.

That quibble is likely academic since there is little chance of the bill’s passage through the Senate. “I don’t think the Republicans here are interested in short-circuiting what their brothers and sisters are doing in statehouses across the country,” Sen. Angus King (I) of Maine told reporters last week.

In this ODR, what the majority wants is no longer operative. Our window for fixing that is closing before our eyes.

Why is it that the flag-waving, defense-loving, “pro-business” party seem intent on allowing the United States to fall further behind Europe and other developed countries? Is it because Republicans protect the quality of life of investors who dodge taxes whereas Democrats protect the quality of life of working Americans who pay theirs?

Eric Levitz offers a very short list:

Over the coming decade, the United States is projected to produce $288 trillion worth of goods and services. In that same time period, our country is also poised to:

• suffer from massive shortages of affordable housing, eldercare, and childcare. 

• remain the only high-income country that does not guarantee paid leave to its new parents, and affordable health insurance to all its citizens.

• invest an infinitesimal fraction of our national resources into mitigating climate change, despite the catastrophic economic, ecological, public health, and national security implications of unchecked global warming.

Democrats want to devote about 1.2 percent of our national income to addressing these and other pressing needs, say Levitz. Yet Republicans are just fine with keeping Democrats from doing so, branding them as socialists even while cosying up to any similarly appointed “socialist” governments across the pond. And to tyrants if their bottom lines are fetching.

Levitz’s target this morning, however, are Republican-enabling Democratic centrists reluctant to bring good things to life, as the old GE commercials said. He enumerates the many good things the centrists stand against:

Alas, a few conservative Democrats think that fighting climate change, caring for the elderly, reducing childcare costs, expanding access to health insurance, providing a child allowance to new parents, increasing housing affordability, and investing in public education aren’t very important objectives. Or at least, they believe that those aims are of such limited importance, it would be outrageous to dedicate $3.5 trillion to them.

Even Republicans will agree to spending at that level — unpaid for — if it is for tax cuts for the wealthy. Got to protect the quality of life of rich investors who will dodge taxes whatever the percentage.

Can the U.S. afford to spend trillions? It has recently… pic.twitter.com/IVYtCLVp4N

— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) October 5, 2021

Owing to their razor-thin legislative margins and support among a couple of stubborn Democrats, Levitz laments, Biden’s agenda initially priced (and reportedly paid for) at $3.5 trillion over 10 years will get pared back to between $1.9 trillion and $2.3 trillion.

What to trim? Levitz offers some ideas, none of them great, he admits:

There are multiple ways to fit a $3.5 trillion peg into a $2.3 trillion hole. One would be to retain almost all of Biden’s current policy initiatives, but in smaller and/or more temporary form. Instead of giving dental benefits to all Medicare beneficiaries, you could restrict such benefits to seniors who earn less than $39,000. Instead of giving a child allowance to 88 percent of U.S. parents, you could give it to the minority of parents who earn less than $50,000 a year.

Meanwhile, you could play games with the budget window: The Congressional Budget Office scores the fiscal cost of legislation based on its budgetary impacts over a decade. So, you could set universal pre-kindergarten, childcare subsidies, and an expansion of the Affordable Care Act to expire in 2025, and hope that a future Congress would find it politically impossible to let those programs die. Or else, you could delay the implementation of expanded Medicare benefits until 2028. Even in its $3.5 trillion form, Biden’s plan included many of these sorts of budget gimmicks. You could therefore produce a bargain-basement version of “Build Back Better” by turning the means tests and phase-outs up to 11.

Or Democrats could drop the means tests and pass the reforms for a limited time on the theory that they will be hard to repeal once implemented. Or pass fewer permanent programs, tossing many important policies but leaving in place durable, legacy achievments.

Catherine Rampell recommends “doing fewer things well, rather than doing a lot of things halfway.” Getting so many programs off the ground simultaneously could be as hard as lifting a starship into orbit. Maybe. But some in the White House take the view that “it’s better to plant many seeds and see what blossoms.” But Democrats face tough choices. Invest in the future, Rampell suggests:

“Building Back Better” almost by definition requires investing in a lower-carbon future, to literally keep the planet habitable. We have a sense of which policies are likely to be most effective. Those policies may not be the exact array of climate programs that Democrats currently offer. (A carbon tax would be more effective at reducing emissions than pretty much anything Democrats are seriously considering, and it would have the added benefit of raising money.)

Their other priorities must include investing in children, particularly low-income children, such as through universal, high-quality pre-K; and a generous child tax credit that aims its firepower at families with low or zero earnings, so that more children are lifted out of poverty. Reducing child poverty is both a humanitarian and economic concern. Investing in children suffering from poverty helps them grow up to become more productive adults, who earn more money, have better health and need fewer services.

She concludes:

Many times Biden has said, “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” His party has tried to wriggle out of the moral implications of that statement by pretending its budget can accommodate every desirable program. Now Democrats must prove what they actually value most.

All made necessary by a couple of Democrats who value outdated Senate tradition and arbitrary spending caps over the needs of their constituents, as well as valuing bipartisan action with political rivals with no scruples about handing windfalls to oligarchs.